by Barbara Vine
But he carried with him always some terrible thing. Oh, why didn’t he tell me? Once we were grown-up, Hope and I, why didn’t he tell us? We would have comforted him; we would have made it better, because we loved him so much.
There was nothing to do the next day. If only she had thought of that, anticipated it, she wouldn’t have come down until this afternoon, would have stayed in a hotel in Plymouth. It was too cold to go out unless going out was essential, as it would be in the evening. Her father’s study was stripped and emptied. It was painful to be in there. She thought of a line he had quoted somewhere: “The flesh, alas, is sad and I have read all the books.” It was true about the books, but her flesh wouldn’t be sad tonight, no matter how cold it was, and how much she reflected and wondered and mourned.
The rapport she and Hope had seemed to establish with their mother a few months back had faded. She hadn’t kissed her and thought she never would again. Whatever burden her father had carried through life, her mother should have helped lighten it. Sarah was sure she hadn’t. She had left him to bear it unhappily alone while pursuing, like the woman in Hand to Mouth, her own selfish and petty interests.
Overnight, her heart had hardened against Ursula and it was with wonder and some self-disgust that she looked back on her journey of the evening before across the moor, when she had speculated on the single state of Stefan and her mother and had considered the possibility of bringing them together. The deceased husband’s brother. Once, and not so long ago, historically speaking, marriage between them would have been against the law, would have counted in some bizarre way as incest.
She had nothing to say to Ursula and said nothing. In the afternoon, a rather wonderful thing happened. Vicky phoned. She sounded embarrassed and rather nervous. Adam Foley was down for the weekend and wanted to join them in the pub, but she had wondered how Sarah would feel—he was for some reason so antagonistic to her, could be so rude—and if it would spoil Sarah’s evening, she, Vicky (her voice strengthening and growing indignant), was quite prepared to call him back and tell him no.
“I’ll be fine,” Sarah said, and she grew tense with excitement. “I don’t mind, you know. I hope I’m tougher than that.”
The outrageous dressing was becoming a habit. She no longer had so many doubts. This time, she painted her mouth blue as well as her fingernails. She plundered Hope’s wardrobe for black stockings, not tights, a skintight miniskirt that would show those stocking tops if she bent over. The shoes, with four-inch heels, were her own. She couldn’t imagine why she had bought them but was glad now that she had. It would be better if her hair were extravagantly long or shorn to her shapely skull, but that couldn’t be helped now.
It was still only half-past six. She sat in her bedroom, reading the one book of her father’s his house now held, the copy she had brought with her, Purple of Cassius. His family was in there—she knew that now—not only Chloe Rule, who was his mother, but Peter, who must be Stefan as a child and perhaps James as an adult, Catherine, who was an amalgam of Margaret and Mary, and the strict God-fearing neighbor, who was another version of Jacob Manley, another face of Joseph.
It wasn’t possible to concentrate on what she was reading. Sexual desire drives out everything else, she thought, takes over, fills the body and expels the mind, turns the blood into some steamy substance, changes the heartbeat, sets the skin on fire.
Ursula looked at her mouth and her shoes, said nothing. She said nothing at the sight of her bent over at the drinks cupboard with her stocking tops showing. But when Sarah poured two inches of whiskey into a tumbler and took a swig of it, she did speak.
“Sarah, are you sure that’s wise when you’re going to drive to Barnstaple?”
“I can take care of myself,” said Sarah. “Don’t you worry about me.”
Tyger wasn’t there. Rosie had a new man, Neil, or perhaps he was just a new companion for the evening. From the moment she got there, from before she got there, Sarah was afraid Adam wouldn’t come. That Rosie had said he would made no difference. Not coming after all might only be the next step in the game of tease and rudeness, disappointment and renewed expectation, the ultimate playing of hard to get.
She kept to whiskey. Her mouth left a blue imprint on the glass. After half an hour, she went to the ladies’ room and, looking at herself in the mirror, thought she looked like someone who has been too long in a cold swimming pool, white-faced, lilac-lipped. When she got back to the table, she told herself, he would be there. She delayed, pushing her fingers through her alreadytangled hair, applying more blue lipstick. But when she got back to the table, he would be there. He wasn’t. Vicky had begun talking about where they should go on to. Barnstaple was such a hopeless place. Why didn’t they all move to London? If they were in London, where lucky Sarah lived and lucky Adam lived, there would be a hundred places to go to; there would be infinite choice. Someone suggested a wine bar that stayed open till midnight. Someone else came up with five fresh drinks on a tray. Alexander said, “Why not eat here?” and everyone started consulting the menu. Sarah couldn’t face food.
Their plates came, the usual pub possibilities, a plowman’s, fish and chips, chicken and chips, all crowded onto the too-small table with sauce bottles and a basket of chopped-up French bread. Sarah picked at the bread, poured herself more wine, then more. She began thinking of what to do if he didn’t come. It was nearly ten. She hadn’t spoken for an hour, apart from saying yes and no. If he didn’t come, it would just be a repetition of last week. But she couldn’t face the lonely drive back, the dark house, her mother there and not her father.
Perhaps there was something Adam expected her to do. Go to the cottage, ring the doorbell, be insulted by him, turned away, then meet five minutes later outside in the dark. Or perhaps he was driving her to do the dreadful thing, the humiliating thing, go home and try again the next week and the next, be driven to phone him in London. But how long could she do that? And wouldn’t such compliance with his wishes defeat the object, since it was antagonism and hostility that he desired as much as she?
She looked up and saw him come in by the side door. In a single moment, a second, her fear and doubt were gone. Heat flooded her, rushed up to her head, so that the beating blood sounded in her ears like the waves of the sea. One rational thought did come, that it was strange, inexplicable, how the sight of someone, not his voice or his touch or his presence but just the distant sight of him, could bring such arousal. She was almost afraid of her own body, so nearly out of control, behaving as it should not now but only later, in his arms, under his hands. For the first time that she could remember, she was aware of gasping involuntarily. Alexander looked at her, raised his eyebrows.
She kept herself sane enough to be thankful they must think her reaction one of trepidation at Adam’s arrival. He came up and stood at the already-full table, said a general “Hi.” He didn’t look at her; she knew he wouldn’t. Rosie moved to the left, Vicky to the right; he pulled up a chair between them and sat down.
“This is Neil,” Rosie said.
“Hi, Neil.”
“We were talking about where to go on to.”
“You always are,” he said.
“Right. Have you got any ideas?”
“There isn’t anywhere.”
“There’s the club. There’s that new wine bar.”
“It won’t affect me, anyway,” he said. “I can’t stop. I only came in for a quick drink.”
He turned upon her a cold, indifferent glance. She returned it. She was so sick with desire that she wondered if her legs would carry her. When he had drunk that drink, he would go and she would have to follow him. The licensee would call time. Suppose she couldn’t get up, couldn’t walk? His cold eyes met hers again. He wanted her to begin. She was to start the exchange that would grow more and more acrimonious, insulting, unbearably exciting.
She said, surprised that she had a voice, “Have you got a date, Adam?”
“What?”
She repeated it, “I asked you if you’d got a date.” He shook his head. It was a movement that implied the impossibility of understanding her, the total mystery of her thought processes. The others had become tense. To her astonishment, she felt Rosie reach for her hand under the table and squeeze it. Adam did the entirely unexpected. He felt in one of the pockets of his voluminous greatcoat and pulled out a book, a paperback, which he threw onto the table. A glass fell over and red wine trickled between the plates, dripped onto the floor. Vicky started mopping it up with a handful of paper napkins.
The book was one of her father’s, Phantom Listeners.
It was dog-eared, the cover with its design of huddled ghosts alarmed by the dawn, curled at the corners and bruised. The wine had splashed its spine, leaving blood-colored drops on the black moth. Sarah put her hand up to her mouth, as if warding off a blow.
“I picked it up off a stall in the flea market,” he said, “for thirty pee. If any of you want to read it, you’re welcome. If you can get through it. I couldn’t.” He slowly turned his head and let his eyes travel from her face, where a blush was mounting, down her body. “You, of course, will already have had that dubious experience.”
She was stunned, had nothing to say, felt the tightening pressure of Rosie’s unwanted, unneeded hand.
“The renowned novelist was something of a pompous old git, wouldn’t you say? Something of a pretentious nerd? I suppose there’s a kind of distinction in writing nineteen books, each one more boring than the last.”
Alexander said, “Adam.”
Simultaneously, Vicky said, “Look, this is embarrassing. Didn’t you know Gerald Candless was Sarah’s dad?”
“There wouldn’t be much point in saying it if he wasn’t, would there? She doesn’t look much like him, though. He had a face like a lizard with whiskers. It’s a wise child that knows its own father, isn’t it?”
“Of course he was my father, you bastard,” Sarah said.
“Charming. Thank you. I hardly suppose it’s anything you’re proud of. I’d keep quiet about it if I were you.”
“Adam! Stop it.” Rosie was on her feet. “We can’t do this anymore. We can’t have you here with us like this. It’s awful; it’s unbelievable.…”
“What, because I tell a woman what she knows already, that the darling of the literary establishment was a clapped-out hack who wrote shit? Who called it art and had the cunning to get others to do the same?”
Sarah wrenched her hand free from Rosie’s. She got up, pulled her father’s sheepskin around her, and, hardly knowing why, picked up the paperback from the table. Holding it in her two hands, she made for the side door to the car park. Vicky’s voice called out, “Sarah, wait …” She didn’t turn her head.
Pain spread across her shoulders and up into her head, settling on the top of her skull like a too-tight hat. It had been hot in there and she was shivering. The night was damp and dark, a black mist hanging above the cars, leaving water on their surfaces in clustered glittering pustules. She unlocked the car and sat in the driver’s seat. Her breath misted up the glass, enclosing her in opaque walls.
She knew it would be no more than five minutes before he opened the passenger door and got in beside her. He would be there in five minutes. It was, in fact, three minutes. The interior light came on and she saw her face in the rearview mirror, ravaged, aged, the mouth blue, as from hypothermia.
He got into the car, closed the door, put his hand on her knee. The light went out and deep darkness came. He took her hand and touched the palm with his tongue.
As if she was very tired, as if she was ill, she said in a weary voice, “It’s no use.” She took her hand away and pushed his hand away. “I can’t. Not tonight. Not ever.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.”
“I do not.”
“The things you said.”
She could see his face only as a vague blur, but she caught the gleam of an eye.
“That was a game,” he said. “You know that. That was the game we play. You like it; I like it. It turns us on.”
“No.”
“You liked it before. It’s happened before.” He was urgent. He was panicking. “For God’s sake. I didn’t mean any of it. I love his writing. I loved that book. You must know I didn’t mean those things.”
She tried to be calm, articulate, partly succeeded. “You said them. I don’t suppose you did mean them. But that doesn’t matter. They were said and they can’t be unsaid. I would never forget them. I will never forget. I can’t help it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I apologize. I’m deeply, truly sorry.” He sounded it. He sounded how she would have hated him to sound at the beginning of it, humble, penitent, afraid. “Please let me unsay them. Come back all I said, can’t we say that?”
“I would if I could.” What’s done cannot be undone, she thought.
“Then say it. You can.”
“I can’t. It was the one place you shouldn’t have stabbed, that’s all.”
“Sarah, I don’t understand you.”
“I’m going home now. Good-bye.”
He began to protest. She got out of the car, went around the front, opened the passenger door, and stood there, waiting. It took him a moment, but he got out. She didn’t look at him, though he was quite clearly visible out here in the lamplight. Back in the car, she started the engine, pressed the switch to demist the windows. By the time she had driven out into the street, he was gone; he was nowhere.
Her head hurt behind her eyes. She needed some relief for pain, but she didn’t know what. Rain began when she was halfway home. The rhythmic swish of the wipers passing to and fro, to and fro, signified a dreadful meaninglessness. She carried the book into the house. It was only a few yards, but she and the book were soaked. She hadn’t cried for years, but she cried when the front door was closed. She dropped onto the floor in the hall, weeping in the dark, her father’s book, a wet, soggy pulp, pressed against her face.
27
What did Scheherezade do after she had told the thousand and first story? Did safety kill the creative impulse in her? Of course not. She began to write. One day the stories she wrote down will come to light and they will be a great improvement on the first thousand because security nourishes talent better than peril.
—HAMADRYAD
THICK FOG PERVADED SARAH’S DREAM, BUT SHE WAS SOMEWHERE IN the country, not on the beach, and there was no color. It was like a black-and-white film, or gray and dark gray. They walked toward each other, she and Adam Foley, emerging out of the fog, met, stood apart. He said, “I never said those things. That was my double saying them.” “You haven’t got a double,” she said, and she felt nothing for him, no desire, no challenge. The fog had condensed and clustered on her arms and hands. She looked down and saw that her whole body glittered with waterdrops like glass from a shattered windscreen.
“He hasn’t a double. There’s no one like him,” her father’s voice said. Then she saw her father where Adam had been. She knew it was her father, but he was young; he looked like Stefan and perhaps also like someone she had never known, someone who died horribly before she was born. “I put it behind me, or I tried,” her Stefan-Desmond-father said. “But it was always in the mist that I saw him.”
She was lonely, with no remedy. She asked herself if she wanted Adam and had to answer honestly that she didn’t; she never wanted to see him again. The house would be sold and she would never go back; she would never see Rosie and Alexander and Vicky again. Or the white mist that came in from the sea. Or the rhododendrons and the white razor shells, the black mussel-shell sand and the island lying becalmed on the flat gray water.
Did she have any friends? Masses of acquaintances, yes. Other lecturers. A sister and a sister’s partner. An uncle, who had his own life, his own children. An aunt she would never meet and cousins she had no wish to know. As usual—and she acknowledged this—she left her mother till last, had almost forg
otten her mother.
The file on Gerald Candless was complete. Or as complete as she could manage. She leafed through the material, newspaper photocopies, her notes, photographs she had brought from Lundy View House, synopses she had made of her father’s books and her own attempts at beginning her book, Jason Thague’s reports, the Candless family tree, the Ryan family tree. She knew everything about him except why. She knew of his childhood, his parents, his stepfather and his brothers and sisters, his school days, his first job and his war service, his job after the war, his moving out of his family’s home, and his disappearance.
What she didn’t know was why he had disappeared and why he had taken on that new identity.
Her memoir would have to be written without that knowledge. With a week to go before her new term started, she sat down at the word processor early in the morning and began. When she had produced two thousand words, she broke off and wrote a letter to Robert Postle. She told him she was sorry about the long delay, that she had had to do research, but now she had made a serious beginning and had set herself a deadline of May. The end of May, she added.
While she was writing Carlyon-Brent’s address on the envelope, her mother phoned. Sarah thought she must be at Lundy View House and asked if it was snowing. Somewhere or other, she had seen snow forecast for the West Country. Ursula said no, not unless it also was in Kentish Town. They sorted it out and Sarah was more interested by the coincidence of her mother’s being in Bloomsbury while she was addressing a letter to the same place than by her reason for the call.
